TradingKey - A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday disrupted operations for businesses and organizations worldwide that rely on the platform, prompting customers to reconsider whether they should diversify data storage or adopt a “multi-cloud strategy.”
The 15-hour AWS service disruption on October 20 was Amazon’s most severe since 2021. While Amazon’s stock did not react with an immediate sell-off, the incident has nonetheless dealt a blow to the reputation of this leading cloud provider.
According to the company, AWS serves over 1 million active customers monthly, operating across 120 availability zones in 38 geographic regions.
Although Amazon still holds one-third of the global cloud market, this outage comes at a time when its cloud division is being rapidly challenged by competitors like Microsoft and Google.
Anurag Rana, Bloomberg analyst, said the disruption could push customers to consider spreading their infrastructure across multiple cloud providers — a potential upside for smaller vendors like Google Cloud.
In Q1 2025, Microsoft Azure grew at 35% year-on-year, Google Cloud at 28%, both outpacing Amazon’s 17% growth. In Q2, while Amazon maintained its 17% cloud revenue growth, Microsoft and Google accelerated further to 39% and 32%, respectively.
However, Rana noted that due to the complexity of cross-cloud migration and widespread industry capacity constraints, this incident is unlikely to lead to a significant loss of market share for Amazon.